The Constant Queen (48 page)

‘Coincidence?’

‘Too much wistful sword play, or so I hope. And at least now she has Otto to preoccupy her. Harald says they will marry in England, when his new marshal is made earl.’

‘Poor Maria.’

‘The wife of an earl?’

‘No, not that – she will like that. I mean the waiting. It is hard on her, I think.’

‘You had to wait a long time for your marriage bed too, Tora. I am sorry for it.’

‘Oh, not as long as you think.’

The words slipped out before she could catch them. Elizaveta stared at her and Tora feared a blast of her friend’s stormy temper but instead she smiled.

‘When?’

‘No matter. I shouldn’t . . .’

‘When, Tora? Before he left Norway? Before Stikelstad? Oh!’ Her hands went to her mouth. ‘You were his first! You devil!’

‘I’m sorry.’ Tora knew she was blushing furiously. ‘I was young, so was he. Did you think . . . ?’

‘That it was me? Lord, no, but I always counted on some slippery Byzantine concubine. Oh Tora, I’m so glad it was you.’

‘You are?’

Tora looked nervously into Elizaveta’s dark eyes; even after all this time with her mercurial fellow queen she was never sure of the turn of her moods.

‘Of course I am. It means he is all ours.’

‘You think?’ Tora waved sardonically to the myriad warships below. ‘He is theirs, is he not? Their commander, their hero, their inspiration.’

Elizaveta slid an arm through hers.

‘In a way, yes, for he is a king, Tora. It is how it has to be, but he is a man too and that bit, my sweet, is ours.’

‘
That
bit?!’

‘Tora, no! Honestly, I try to be serious for once and you . . .’

But now Harald was coming up the hillside, his chain mail glistening in the sun and his ice-blonde hair locked beneath an iron helmet and suddenly everything felt very, very serious. Tora looked
to Elizaveta but for once her fellow queen was frozen, her eyes on the Norwegian grass around her dainty feet, and it was left to Tora to say the words she had long dreaded: ‘You are ready to
sail, Hari?’

‘Almost. I need my banner.’

Tora’s hand went again to her bag. Elizaveta stared at her.

‘Tora? What do you have in there?’

Tora fumbled awkwardly with the package, half withdrew it.

‘I asked Harald for it. I hope you don’t mind. I knew you wouldn’t have the time and you don’t like sewing as I do and . . .’

‘Oh Tora,’ Elizaveta interrupted, ‘stop gabbling and let me see.’ She seized the package and unwrapped it. ‘Oh!’

The raven flew free and now, all around the edges of the golden rectangle that contained it, the black and red border swirled, proud and glorious. Elizaveta stared at it and Tora thought she saw
tears in her friend’s eyes.

‘You did this?’

‘I wanted to help. To contribute.’ Still Elizaveta stared and Tora felt herself curl up inside; she had not wanted to offend her, not now, with her sailing to the Lord knew what.
‘I’m sorry. I thought . . .’

But suddenly Elizaveta was enveloping her in a hug so tight she thought a vice might have closed around her.

‘It’s beautiful, Tora. So, so much better than I could ever have done it. Now we will carry a little bit of you with us to England.’

Tora wiped away tears and clasped Elizaveta in return. She had never truly grasped her dear friend’s moods and maybe now she never would. She looked to Harald.

‘You will . . . you will take care.’

‘Take care?’ Harald lifted the banner high, admiring it. ‘I will take care to ride into battle before they do.’ Tora shivered and Elizaveta pushed at him. He relented.
‘I will try, Tora, though it does not come naturally to me.’

‘You will, at least then, win.’

He took her hand and bowed low.

‘I will win.’

Tora saw him again, then, leaping from a skiff, a wolf in the magical dusk of midsummer. He had chased her down that night and she had been a willing prey. Through it all, she had been a willing
prey but now he was sailing away again as if none of it had ever been.

‘My wolf man,’ she said fondly, and then she was in his arms, hugging him so tight his chain mail pressed into her skin and then tighter again in the hope that its ringed imprint
would stay there, etched upon her, until she heard he had won and he was safe.

‘You will come to the jetties, Tora?’ he asked when finally they drew apart. ‘You will come to see us off?’

She did not wish to. She wished to stay up here where the ships looked like toys and the men like speckles across her imagination. She wished to keep away from this mission that promised to gain
them all so much and yet threatened to lose them everything. But she was Queen of Norway now, Harald’s regent, and she knew her duty. Always she had known her duty.

‘I will come,’ she said.

And so Tora stood on Norway’s western shore, Magnus at her side and a handful of guards at her back as the rest of her beloved country’s men – or so it felt
– drew up their anchors, turned their prows to the open sea and set sail. She stood with all her precious country’s wives, mothers, and daughters, caught in the painful gap between
pride and fear, and waved until the three hundred ships moved around the Solund Isles and tipped their red and white sails over the horizon.

A part of her wished she was like Harald and Elizaveta with their seawater veins and their adventurous spirits. She longed to know what it must feel like to have this itch inside you and yet it
seemed such an uncomfortable, painful way to be ruled. Harald was a true Viking and everyone loved him for it, yet he worried about his pagan heart, as if it did not really belong in their modern
world. Did Tora’s yearning for peace fit the new, more stable way of governing better, or was her time yet to come? If so, she feared she would not live to see it, even safe on her own
shores.

A huge cheer went up from the bay as Harald’s eagle cut through the waters at the cusp of the open sea, the flag edged with her own embroidery flying proudly above it, and she shook her
foolish musings away. What did it matter where anyone’s spirit truly lay when their fate was in the here and now? They all had to fight. Harald and Elizaveta would sail forth into the attack
and she – she would stand as bravely as she could here, at home.

Standing on her tiptoes to see as far over the treacherous horizon as she possibly could, Tora waved at Olaf and at Harald and at Elizaveta as they shrank and then tipped over the edge of her
world. And when, finally, they were all gone, she took Magnus’s arm and turned her steps back inland to wait.

The Orkneys, August 1066

‘L
ily, wake up!’

Elizaveta stirred, opened her eyes. Harald was stood over her, fully dressed, and she started awake.

‘What is it Hari? You’re not going already?’

‘No. Hush.’ He kissed her quiet. ‘I just couldn’t sleep. The day is dawning, Lily –
our
day is dawning. Will you come and see it rise with me?’

She looked up into his eyes, more gold than grey as they shone eagerly down at her in the half-light.

‘Of course I will.’

She flung back the covers, drawing in a sharp breath as the autumn air bit at her bare skin, and gratefully pulled on the shift Harald held out for her. She covered it swiftly with the fine gown
Greta had laid out last night. It was a rich purple, trimmed with gold, and was intended to make her look regal as she waved the troops off on their great mission but for now she was just grateful
for its warmth.

Harald was already at the door of their bower and she pushed her feet into her calfskin shoes and went to join him. A single line of pink hovered along the horizon and she took his hand as they
stepped out towards it.

‘The girls . . . ?’

She glanced back; Maria and Ingrid were on the upper floor of the bower.

‘They are well. I looked in on them.’

‘You did?’

‘Just to check. They’re so funny, Lily, even now they are all but women. Ingrid is tucked up tight, even her hair neat on the pillow, and Maria is all limbs.’

‘You like her best.’

‘No. She just . . . lodges more sharply in my heart.’

‘And you in hers. They are sleeping?’

‘Like babies.’

Elizaveta smiled.

‘As should we be.’

‘Nay, wife – why sleep when there are adventures to be had? Come!’

He tugged her forward and together they crept across the central yard of Thorfinn’s great compound, tiptoeing so as not to disturb the sleepers in the halls and outbuildings all round.
They made it out into the meadow and began to climb the Brough just as, to their left, the topmost part of the sun broke free of the soft waves of the bay and reached out sparkling fingers across
the land.

The light caught in the dew, so thick on the rough sea grass that it seemed for a moment as if the whole land were a pool of gold and their every step a ripple in the dawn. Elizaveta clutched
tight at Harald’s calloused fingers and he smiled down at her.

‘All will be well, Lilyveta, I know it.’

She nodded but her body was too clogged with the effort of storing up the imprint of his hand to speak. She trod onwards but the calfskin shoes she’d foolishly chosen were sodden already
and she could feel a chill damp penetrating to her toes. Lifting her heavy skirts, she looked down at the delicate leather, dark with moisture.

‘My feet are wet, Hari.’

He stopped.

‘I’ll carry you.’

‘No!’ She batted him away. ‘I’m too heavy. You can hardly go into battle with a limp caused by lifting your wife.’

‘Here then.’

He bent and untied his own sturdy soldier’s boots then, before she could protest, lifted up one of her feet and, shoe and all, slid it into one of the boots.

‘Hari . . .’

‘And the other one. Perfect, Lily. Is that not perfect?’

‘They sort of fit,’ she admitted.

‘Good.’ He tied them around her ankles, his fingers like tiny spiders across her skin. ‘Now hurry – I want to beat the sun to the top.’

She laughed and let him pull her forward again, though her feet were awkward with the new weight and she clumped after him like a fool.

‘See, Lily,’ he encouraged her, wriggling his own bare toes in the grass. ‘Now you know what it’s like to walk in my shoes.’

‘I do. It is heavy, Hari.’

‘I am trained to it.’ He kissed her again. ‘We’re nearly there, my sweet. Look – there are the first of our ships.’

They’d crested the rise now and, sure enough, Elizaveta could see the tips of myriad masts poking up into the sky, swaying gently on the morning breeze.

‘Like lances,’ Harald said, ‘ready to strike.’

He was right, she supposed, though she’d never have seen that for herself. She was standing in his shoes but she could not quite see with his eyes. Adventure she understood deep in her own
soul, but war? War was his alone.

‘You are sure about this invasion, Hari?’ she said, pulling him to a halt in the shadow of the old broch.

‘You ask me that
now
?’

She leaned in against him and felt his arms enfold her as they had done for so many years, even when she’d pushed him away.

‘We have been on this journey a long time,’ she whispered into his chest.

‘And have plenty of years still to go – the best yet.’

‘You will be careful?’

She heard his laugh, low and sweet against the sudden cry of a seabird rising over the cliff.

‘You sound like Tora.’

Elizaveta tried to laugh with him but her mirth was fractured by a memory of her friend, stood on the jetty back in Norway. She had always before thought of Tora as a woman of presence with the
big, voluptuous body of her own solid mother, but that day, on the arm of the son Elizaveta could so vividly remember being born, she had looked tiny.

Elizaveta had felt herself huge with excitement and anticipation in comparison and had pitied Tora’s tight little frame as it had receded into a dot on the narrow stretch of the
Sognafjord. This morning, though, with her own fears suddenly battering at her chest, she remembered Tora differently – her shoulders square against her fears and her back straight with her
responsibilities.

‘Perhaps Tora was right, Hari,’ she said. ‘Perhaps we should have contented ourselves with Norway.’

‘And miss this?’

He reached down and gently took hold of her chin, tipping it up and out towards the sea. Elizaveta stared. The sun was a perfect disc atop the ocean, casting a path of white light all the way to
their feet.

‘’Tis as bright as your hair,’ she murmured, caught in its beauty.

‘A sign,’ he replied. ‘I told you, Lily, all will be well. We were not content in Norway, not really.’

‘
You
were.’

‘Momentarily distracted, that’s all. You freed me; took me back to my true self.’

‘The man with seawater in his veins?’

He smiled and turned them both to the ocean below.

‘When I limped away from Stikelstad aged fifteen, Lily, I became an adventurer – a Varangian. I was bitter at the time but I have seen so much because of it, done so much, and I have
loved it all.’